


Songe à la douceur

by gamblers



Category: Ao no Exorcist | Blue Exorcist
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fleurs du mal, M/M, Recreational Drugs, Recreational Nihilism, Recreational Sex, Ugly tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 11:59:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10944048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamblers/pseuds/gamblers
Summary: You were there when your vessel went down, Kirigakure Shura. But even after all that, you still wanna learn how to fly?





	Songe à la douceur

**Author's Note:**

> oh boy, this is not a happy fic. the yuri in this story is presented as a fair bit younger than how she was canonically introduced in ch89; some lines were also borrowed from that chapter. title & concept reference baudelaire’s _L’invitation au voyage_.
> 
> lastly, there are mentions of **non-graphic drug (ab)use** in this story.

  
   
   
   


Some time later Shura decided to get her chest tatted up again, in the same place on her body where Hachirou had regurgitated the stolen years of her lifespan.

“Only this time I want it in your finest crimson ink,” she joked with Momoko, the cute tattoo artist she’d enlisted to aid her in this dumb endeavor. “And not some psychotic thousand-year-old Japanese hydra’s expired blood.”

Momoko only shrugged. Momoko was suave like that. “Is that right?”

Shura met Momoko three weeks ago, en route to her next exorcism assignment. The whole encounter had been very much unremarkable. She remembered the sky being two-thirds grey and one-third cloudy, remembered herself being two-thirds lonely and one-third fucked up, remembered finally how she had been drawn just as much to the pretty proprietor of the establishment as she’d been to the pretty inkwork she’d glimpsed on the walls of the shop’s interior. Couldn’t remember how many cigarettes she’d smoked that day, but she could probably live with leaving that off the record.

“Hold still, Shura-san, or do you wanna walk out of here with some fucked up kanji on your boobs? Cuz that’ll be on you.”

“Yeah, but that’s the point, at least it’ll be _on_ me, won’t it?” Shura grinned. To be perfectly honest, she didn’t care what the fuck Momoko wanted to put on her skin. The goal here was more about getting _something_ on her skin, and not having Hachirou’s curse retroactively tagged on as some garbage aftertaste of her mother’s (and her mother’s mother’s, and her _mother’s mother’s_ mother’s) shitty hubris. “Have at it, then, Momo-chan.”

Momoko rolled her eyes, and reached for the bottle of iodine on her metal tray. “As you wish, Miss Exorcist.”

Shura was burning the candle fast, both of them were, even Momoko could tell as much. But then again she hadn’t complained when Shura was eating her out against the door of the leftmost bathroom stall of the club last night, certainly not; her sentiments had yielded quite the opposite resolution, if they were going by any indication of her moans tripping over the loud synth and her sharp nails digging dim pools into the shine of Shura’s blonde hair.

“Can’t believe I agreed to do this without charging you, I must like you a damn lot,” was all Momoko muttered under her breath, which Shura took to represent her concession in this matter. She could still blame it on the three lines of blow she did three hours prior to the moans and the dim pools, but that would’ve been on Shura, too. And she wouldn’t anyway, didn’t have the heart to, as in anatomically she did not possess a heart, because she was a demon, and the girl that she was fucking had to be a goddamn exorcist.

Serendipity was lowkey the fucking worst.

“Please don’t hurt me too much.”

“Yeah? Speak for yourself.”

“Come on, Momoko, you know I wouldn’t do that. I like you a lot, I really do. You’re doing me a favor.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“…OK, I get it. Now seriously, _hold still_.”

**「温」**

It was gonna look better this way, Shura would be the first to tell people that, too much plain skin dripping into her visage while she curled her eyelashes in the morning otherwise. And she couldn’t help the latter issue—the more embarrassed stares she got, the more comfortable she felt about not giving a fuck. It had nothing to do with style, either. Her logic on that front was purely economical. Demon viscera scrubbed off of colorful fabric easier, and when there was altogether less fabric to scrub she could scrimp some at the coin laundry for another six-pack of Asahi. Plus people got to check out Shura’s tight ass. Nobody lost there.

“Hey, Momo-chan. You wanna hear a funny story?”

“Not particularly,” said Momoko. Dark strands of her hair fell into her face as she leaned forward, guiding the needles tipping out of her thumb and forefinger to sink lower into Shura’s skin. “But I suppose you can share, since we’ll be here a while. Surprise me with your erudition.”

“You got it, boss.”

**「柔」**

Shura broke up with Momoko shortly after that, mostly because she needed to exorcise her.

It helped that Momoko was high for most of it. The veneer of the marijuana had blurred her agility, but she’d been conscious of Shura’s bloodthirst even before Shura unsheathed her weapon. This was as far as her feelings were going to fly. Ultimately she experienced the most nonchalant amount of remorse, when the blade melted deep through her torso and out the back of her spine.

“I really ought to have ripped out your heart when I gave you that tattoo,” Momoko told Shura, between nonchalant amounts of remorse. “For a moment I wondered if you’d actually fallen for me.”

“There’s no need to be crass,” said Shura, and noted the despondency in her own voice. It was a level of temperature that, years back, she would never have thought she’d be capable of. “Also, there’s no shortage of cocaine in Gehenna. You’ll be totally fine, Momo-chan! I hear Satan’s looking for a new tattoo artist.”

What she really meant was, _You’re a demon. You don’t believe in love in the first place._

“Bitch,” Momoko spat out, before evaporating into a pretty cloud of dust.

...And well, the point was that Shura got a nice tattoo out of it.

  
   
   
   


“You like how it looks?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s nice.” Yukio barely glanced at her chest. Unfortunately he seemed to possess a pathological aversion to Shura’s breasts, likely a side effect of skipping out on his pubescent phase or whatever. His loss, really. “I can’t believe you had sex with a demon to get her guard down. I know you don’t have the snake god’s power anymore, but must you resort to such measures?”

Shura laughed. “I don’t just fuck with anybody, OK. She was super cute. And you sound… _way_ more disgusted than you have any right to be. Or perhaps just jealous?”

“Oh, yeah.” Yukio’s nostrils flared. “I’m _totally jealous_ , wow, you got me good there. Are you going to write up your case report soon?”

“Well,” said Shura, trailing off as meaningfully as she could. “I mean. I’ve been pretty busy…” She was daring Yukio to take the high road.

Yukio pushed his glasses further up his face, daring her to dare him to take the high road.

“I was hoping you’d do it for me?”

“…”

“Since I’ve gotta train Rin, and all. Or keep him away from Suguro, whichever one is easiest.” Which was to say, neither, because Shura wasn’t a fuckin’ babysitter, or a homeroom teacher, or a goddamn couples’ therapy counselor.

“Oh no you don’t,” said Yukio. “Don’t you dare try to push this one on me too, I’ve got enough on my plate as it is. See, while _you_ were off fraternizing with demon tattoo artists and getting them to scribble ugly kanji on your body, I’ve actually been productive.”

“They’re not ugly,” said Shura, genuinely hurt. “And I really can’t, I’ve got plans!! Places to be.”

“For what? What could you possibly have that’s more important than writing a field report?”

“I have a thing this weekend. I cleared out my schedule for it already! Come on.”

“A thing? What’s that, some new kind of drug you’re doing?”

“Ha ha! I wish.”

  
   
   
   


The molly blew her pupils wide open and splayed her depth perception over a cold cloud of electronic binary data, the serialized reading of this emotion viscerally redeemable for the duration of the next two hours. She’d only crushed half a cap into her bloodstream but she hadn’t rolled in a while and the euphoria had been corked up too long inside some noxious fantasy for it not to grapple at her neurotransmitters and tighten its hold on the last parity bit of her existential narrative. Or something like that. Shura didn’t make the rules with drugs. And MDMA didn’t play by those rules anyway.

Here, her outfit (or lack of one) fit right in. She didn’t even like EDM, but Seven Lions orchestrated a set that was absolutely religious and at this point in the evening, the motion of the warm bodies in her vicinity dictated to her what she liked and what she didn’t. Next to her, Hachirou’s fifth head was sloshing his emotions all over the place. This one was three rows of teeth and no bones, his skin so white he was practically transparent. Come any closer and she could really pick out his veins from his flesh. The beat dropped. He grabbed her face and kissed her deep, his lips coarse against her mouth, fingers slack against her skin.

 _Don’t leave,_ he begged. The instrument of his bargaining chip was a homogeneous mixture of possible disbelief, and possible enamorment, and possible fury, and certain despair. _I need you. I’ll die without you next to me._

“You’re rolling,” Shura reassured him, because that was the not-so obvious part of his experience. She let him lace his fingers around her waist, anyway. “And I’m dying already.”

She pretended to remember none of it, later. Mostly because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but also because she was technically free from him. She was free from all the patronizing crap that had originally stripped her of her life force. Humans retained such short meaningless lives anyway, and wasn’t that what Hachirou’s fifth head had preached to her for centuries, so how was Shura any different from them now? She wondered why he wasn’t more repelled by that singular aspect of her identity.

“You should go back to Aomori,” she told him, shortly after peaking. “You don’t belong here, Hachirou. We don’t love each other anymore.”

Thereafter the rough edges of the molly began to cut into her skin, and circulate bonafide depression back into her lungs.

  
   
   
   


When she opened her eyes again it was the middle of the morning. The sun had already slipped up several degrees over the horizon, another two-thirds of it grey and one-third of it cloudy. She skipped breakfast to grind the electronic music out of her ears. On her way out of her apartment she shook a couple serotonin precursors out of a plastic bottle and swallowed them dry. Fuck it, there were still so many things wrong with her current perspective.

Rin, for once, was early to his private lesson. 

“Or maybe you’re just super late.” He rolled his eyes at her, but he didn’t look like he’d missed her all that much. The pitching machine in the dojo whirred behind him, fresh off a round on Intermediate Suicide Mode.

“Whatever,” said Shura. “I’m just here to watch and maybe whack you a couple times. Not like you’re set to go protect any top-secret main branch treasure chests in the immediate future. I would teach you some broken kenjutsu otherwise.” She really didn’t have much of an agenda anymore. Maybe she was really starting to miss Kiba.

Rin opened and then closed his mouth abruptly, looking like he was physically trying to bite down on words he didn’t mean or want to say out loud.

“Say that I had… something else that I wanted to protect.”

“Listen, if it’s about Suguro, I already know, and I’m sure he doesn’t want you looking after him all the time anyway,” Shura yawned.

Rin’s cheeks turned a visible hue of pink. “H-How did you—uh, I mean, why d’you figure it’s about Suguro, huh?”

“Jeez, what else could any of your stupid outbursts _possibly_ be about?” Shura snorted. She wasn’t gonna explain herself. Some kids, honestly. Classic chuunibyou tunnel vision, and Okumura’s case was as bad as Shura had ever seen it. “Maybe try telling him how you feel, Rin. He’s not going to bite your dick off. Unless if that’s what you want.”

“...Holy _crap_ , Shura-san, I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

OK, now this was just too much. Shura bit back her laughter. “Oh my god, am I triggering you? What was the name of that shoujo manga Kamiki showed Moriyama, _Hana Yori Exorcist_ or whatever it was called? Maybe you should educate yourself a bit with the source material first, before you come to your sensei looking for help. Make use of me properly! I teach you how to win fights with your sword, not with your feelings.”

“Yeah,” Rin said sourly. “Because you don’t have any of those, right?”

Shura paused for a moment. “You’re not wrong about that.”

It was then that Okumura’s man of the hour walked into the classroom.

“Kinda tacky, isn’t that,” Suguro remarked, and Shura supposed that he might be the first person to actually spare a critical eye to her new tattoo. “Isn’t it only Westerners that like to get a bunch of uninspired Chinese characters tattooed on their body? This kinda thing could ruin your image, sensei.”

“Yeah, alright,” Shura smiled wanly. “You fuck off, too.”

  
   
   
   


For example: Yuri hadn’t gotten to fuck around with Shirou, either.

Or, Shirou hadn’t gotten to fuck around with her, more like, if Shura wanted to be 100 percent factual about it. That was the airtight intangibility to Egin Yuri’s existential narrative, and Shura wasn’t the only one to apply salt to that emotional wound. Yuri didn’t fuck around with beginners, and Fujimoto, for all of his bad habits and silly grown-ass adult perversions, fell on his sword in that category of depravity.

So Shura didn’t deserve Yuri, but neither did Shirou.

And Shura had to admit it; there was something so, so very attractive about airtight intangibility. It was the line of optimism that bordered the garden path leading to Yuri’s workshop, up thirty-six worn stone steps that Shura could skip past in eighteen strides, behind the carved stone arch of the door, two-thirds of it spell-stained and one-third of it immaculate. Push once on the handle and there Yuri would sit on the chopping block, delicately poised over her bible of demon-banishing flora, ankles crossed, hair tied up so Shura could see the bare nape of her neck.

She would turn around, then, exhibit an opulent level of familiarity by smiling so bright that it hurt Shura to look her straight in the eye.

This was the Egin Yuri that Shura had loved.

“Was it so obvious that I was lying about you to everyone,” she had asked Yuri back then, half-scared of the response that she was gonna hear but half-sure that she wanted to hear it anyway. “That I never hated you like you expected me to?”

“Shura.”

“Yeah.”

“Your red hair is really so pretty, did you know?”

“Yeah?”

“My point is, you can’t hurt somebody who wants to be hurt.”

  
   
   
   


At the conclusion of combat practice with Rin and his eminent source of happiness, Shura made a weak break for the door. Back in the hallway, she could discern muted sounds of water from the concrete fountain and the laughter of True Cross Academy students, behind the Exwire classrooms separating her world from regular old Assiah.

The classroom door to her right creaked, and Yukio emerged from the entrance. So he had been waiting to ambush her. She probably should have expected that.

“I won’t be taking the high road on this one,” said Yukio. “Can we talk?”

 _No_ , she wanted to tell him, but kept her frown small because saying that would probably make it like, _that_ much worse. “If it’s about the field report, I’ll have it done by tomorrow. My brain cells are ah, just a bit fucked right now. If I’m being honest with ya.”

Yukio sighed. It wasn’t a very loud sigh, but just about loud enough that he meant for her to hear it. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

Yukio inhaled.

“Shura,” he said.

“Yes?”

“We had a trail on Hachirou’s fifth head from last weekend.”

“And?”

Yukio exhaled.

“Can we talk?” he asked again.

“So you’re worried about me, then, is that it?” Shura asked, stopping, and surmised as much when Yukio didn’t immediately respond with some curated insult.

Shura knew Yukio very well. Too well, in fact, and she blamed Shirou for that. Yukio’s supply of shitty stoicism was an accumulation of karma, exponentiated by early adolescent memories of the two of them sparring in the True Cross dojo, his doubt layered between flashes of brilliance layered between a veritably tragic montage of childhood trauma. Warm-faced, sticky-fingered seven-year-olds didn’t become dispassionate prodigal sons overnight. Shura knew Yukio very well.

She wondered why it still surprised her, then.

“Is it wrong to be worried about you,” Yukio spoke up, his voice suddenly thick. “I’m not expecting you to worry about me back or anything. Or is that still too selfish?”

Shura didn’t know what to say. _How long has it been_ , she only wanted to ask, _How long have you felt this way?_ But it was pointless to place Yukio in front of a question like that.

“Don’t be a chump,” was all she could muster, as grandly as she could. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

“Wish I could believe that,” said Yukio quietly. They’d both stopped before the exit to True Cross, now, and he was staring at her rather petulantly. He was locking her eyes into place and discarding the key. The expression that he presently wore was so similar to Yuri’s. She momentarily wished she could tell him that. But she couldn’t do that, either—she’d only met Egin Yuri once in her life, after all.

“You’ll need to! For my sake.”

“Hmph.”

_Besides, you need somebody to take care of you too, Yukio, don’t you?_

  
   
   
   


It was the dregs of summer in Aomori, when she took Yuri back home.

The train ride up had been warm, but stepping off the platform Shura was confronted by cool-toned air and subtle seasonal affective disorder. Above the skyline, she could see the volcanic mountains beginning to meld into that idyllic shade of autumn. Towada-ko would no doubt be packed this time of year with families, and tourists, and families of tourists.

Next to her, Yuri squeezed Shura’s hand.

They reached the first forest belonging to Hachirou in the late afternoon, just before sunlight could announce its retirement for the day. Summer in Aomori was lukewarm at best, and entirely not wistful enough. Shura’s fingers itched. The earth under her feet here was still damp, tempered by the lake’s mildly wetlandish climate and some nuanced rainfall at the neck of the caldera.

Hachiroutarou was never gonna come knocking at her door. Of course she would have to bring the mountain to Mohammed.

“I don’t know what we are hoping to accomplish here, honestly, besides making him angrier with me.”

“It is a matter of perspective,” said Yuri gently. “I want to meet the only man you’ve ever loved.”

“You realize that most people want to do the opposite, right? Like, I don’t wanna see or hear about anybody else you’ve ever loved. Because that shit will only hurt me.”

Yuri wasn’t riled. “You’re telling me that it’s wrong to scope out my competition?”

“There is no competition,” said Shura, very staunchly. “And even if it were one, you’ve already won, haven’t you?”

“If you have to ask,” said Yuri, “then you must still have some doubts.”

“Then I know. I know you’ve won already.”

Yuri only smiled. “I haven’t, though. He has the final say on your existence. Compared to that, I only have your heart.”

 _Those were the kind of words_ , Shura had thought. Those were the kind of words that made you really wish you could fly.

“Sorry.”

“Please don’t say that.”

  
   
   
   


In the weeks after Yuri’s death, Shura moved out of the True Cross countryside and back into the city. Nobody tried to stop her, but that was not altogether unexpected. She didn’t think even Fujimoto could level the extent of damage that the entire ordeal had dealt on her inner psyche. But to be fair, she probably hadn’t been aware of it herself, or at least not until after she was on fire.

And she didn’t (she _couldn’t_ ) hate Yuri for that.

She’d lasted barely two weeks in the city. On the second Wednesday she’d told Shirou, “I think I might go to Hokkaido instead.”

“Isolating ourselves further, are we?” Shirou had cocked his head at her. “And what sorta problem d’you imagine that would solve?”

“It’s barely a step up from Aomori.” That one had been a hollow sentiment. In reality she’d already started to box up her bikini tops. “Maybe I just like snow.”

No, she could never hate Yuri for anything.

Ishikari, as it transpired, was spectacularly crisp for her thoughts. Because cold temperatures were delicate, but also because January was a miserable month with no feelings, the scarcity of moisture in the air rendered the city two-thirds translucent under the sunlight and one-third crawling with lost children and youkai. So she had her work cut out for her, which was nice for a change.

Her apartment was on the third floor of a five-story complex, relatively old & reluctantly quiet. In the mornings she left her building to fulfill the golden quota that kept mouths at main branch from chirping at her, and in the aftermath of all the elegant bloodshed she often encountered enough loneliness to leave and spend a night in Sapporo, shedding her too-warm clothing for want of a stranger’s too-warm body.

It wasn’t as difficult as she’d imagined. Doing this kind of thing again. She had gotten the hang of picking girls up at a bar when she was going through that wholly ridiculous era of self-sabotage, re: let’s-make-Shirou-as-jealous-as-possible. And it didn’t seem to hurt, although she suspected that that was a consequence of being too numb to feel anything at all.

On the rebound, she was not.

She was fucking one such girl on one such night, when this design came to a halt. She’d just about wedged herself and three of her fingers into a nice hot corner, at which point she noticed that her partner’s enchantment had begun to fray. Another extra three seconds passed before she properly registered this smell to her library of objective correlatives, and she reveled in that fact. Three seconds was not optimal. Her opponent was a powerful one, likely ancient.

Kiba stirred in her chest cavity.

Shura sprang up and reached for the curtains. An asymmetrical sliver of moonlight fell from the window, and cast into the palpable darkness of the hotel room, clung to the vulpine planes of the girl’s face. Shura could now see the faint rows of whiskers radiating outward from cheek to ear.

“What does the nine-tailed fox want with an eight-headed serpent’s fang?”

“OK, OK.” Kamiki Tamamo rubbed the heels of palms into her eyes. “Look, I didn’t mean for it to come out like this.”

She sounded apologetic. It made Shura even less sympathetic. “You gonna answer my question?”

“I…well, Tama-chan was just doing some reconnaissance. Happy?”

Shura narrowed her eyes. “Not really.”

“Don’t make this difficult for the both of us,” Tamamo said, distressed. “Honestly, Tama-chan just wanted to resolve this matter quickly. Tama-chan has two daughters, you see, and they’re both very anxious to see their mother come back home today.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t _they_ like to know what their mother is up to right about now.”

“It’s Fujimoto Shirou. I had some business in this region, so he sent a message up with me.”

“Funny,” said Shura, “I don’t remember your kind being the type to answer to exorcists.”

Tamamo’s smile was slightly feral. “Shura-chan, I answered to your every whim tonight.” And alright, OK, she was kind of sexy, still.

“Fine. What does Shirou want from me, then?”

“Shirou doesn’t want anything from you. He just told me that he needed you to come home.”

Hearing that, Shura had to chuckle. “Little too late for him to start caring again, isn’t it?”

“They found Egin Yuri’s will.”

Tamamo was no longer looking at her in the eye. Perhaps she was politely waiting for a response from Shura, or perhaps she was still hot on the insides and wanted Shura to finish her off, or perhaps she’d simply lost the strategy of her situation. Shura noticed this, in addition to the _thump thump_ of her own heartbeat crawling up to the back of her throat.

“So I can run all I want to, but in the end I still can’t hide? Sounds about right.”

  
   
   
   


Once in awhile, she would revisit the softness. The velvet in the air that wrapped around Yuri, how her hands had felt against Shura’s chest, the warmth of her palms and the liquified light that dispersed from her hair. It was unequivocally the most euphoric Shura had ever felt from merely laying her hands on a material. It was a thing that attached feathers to her feelings and made her wish that she could keep going up, up, further into the ascent. Better than what any drug had done for her existential narrative. It was really fucked up, how these temperaments worked. How the simplest shit could make the reality of Kirigakure Shura and Egin Yuri seep into an alternate dimension.

“And just by the way, those shinobi from Konohagakure called the other day. Isn’t Kamiki Tamamo supposed to be sealed inside some ninja brat’s belly button? How the fuck did she find me like that. I really wonder!”

“Wrong subplot,” Fujimoto groaned. “Maybe you could try reading _Hana Yori Exorcist_ instead.”

  
   
   
   


Aomori had been a complete shitshow. But Aomori wasn’t what had caught her off-guard.

Understandably, Hachirou’s third head had been livid with her. He literally gave her one job. Go out into the wild and produce an heir. All you needed to do was fuck one boy, Tatsuko, artificially inseminate yourself if you can’t get it up. But now you’ve come home with another girl, are you trying to make a fool out of me, or do you just want to die that bad? I could disown you right now.

Fucking do it then, Shura wanted to say. I’d rather I never had to deal with your shit ever again.

It was a factitious threat. He’d never kill her, or at least not at the consequence of such absurdity. There was only one proper way to die for Shura, which trivialized his plight of being in love with her for an eternity and everything. But then again, at that time Shura couldn’t read airtight intangibility if it bit her in the ass.

“I told him, I said he could expect one child.”

“Who is ‘he’?”

“Satan. Obviously.”

 _Obviously,_ Shura thought, before she realized what Yuri was really saying. “Wait, what? What do you mean by _one_?” 

“…”

“Aren’t you having twins?”

“Shura, listen to me.” Yuri’s next words were very swift, very deliberate. “I will keep one child. You will take the other one to Aomori. We’ll renegotiate your the terms of your contract. And then Hachirou won’t—”

“ _No_ , oh my god, what the fuck,” Shura cried, because _the very idea of that_. “Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“They’re your _children_ , Yuri. You’re thinking about separating your _children_. Why would you go that far? Don’t be stupid. ”

“Am I really being stupid, Shura?” Yuri’s gaze had been so effortless. She had locked Shura’s eyes in place and discarded the key. “I just want you to be happy.”

It was the way she had spoken to Shura. It was the way she hadn’t even hesitated. Eventually it would persist as a memory in Shura’s head semi-permanently. Eventually she would attempt to bleed this memory out of her system with loud music and blurred drug trips, many times over many months, to no avail. It would stay with her forever as long as she tried to fly.

  
   
   
   


There were no windows in the True Cross Hospital room that received her. The walls were left intentionally blank, a canvas for clinical trauma, and the dialysis bag swinging above her left arm was the only precipitate source of motion in an otherwise suspended level of purgatory.

“Overdosed, didn’t I,” she said, when her lips could finally form the words aloud.

“What do you think,” said Shirou. He sat facing her, twiddling his thumbs from a chair across the room.

“You… Were you here the whole time?”

“Am I ever not?”

Shura had no reply to that.

“The drugs are gonna just keep eating away at the rest of your endorphins. You know that, right? How many times have you rolled already? They say that after seven times you’ll end up permanently miserable for a substantial amount of your life.”

“Well I’ve only done it six times,” Shura lied, in a similar manner to the last six times she’d told somebody that she’d only done it six times.

“I’ll ask Yuri to take a look at you,” said Shirou, and there, that was it. Shura’s breaking point.

“I don’t want that from you, or _her_ ,” she narrowed her eyes. “I don’t want that from either of you. Your fucking pity. I never wanted that. I hope you both fucking die.”

It sounded even more pathetic than she’d imagined, given the time and duality of her position. Trying desperately to prove her case in a plasticky hospital gown, flanked by blank clinical trauma, beneath a swinging dialysis bag.

So be it. She would quit flying, and that was when she knew the memories would curl up and disintegrate. Until Egin Yuri was merely bright, and kind, and beautiful. Until Shura could only remember meeting her just once in her life.

Maybe this was also a part of that softness.

  
   
   
   


(Egin Yuri’s will did not mention Kirigakure Shura.)

  
   
   
   


She understood very clearly that she’d crossed the apex of the ascent. It was not about her freedom or the fight she put up for it or even being bereft of a dying will. It was not about being granted immunity from romantic deadweight. When Hachirou regurgitated the stolen years of her lifespan, the first and only thought that had really crossed Shura’s mind was: _shit, now I gotta try being happy for the rest of my life._

  
   
   
   


**Author's Note:**

> OK i wanted to write a long paragraph explaining the theory i had behind yuri's confounded logic but ig if anything this was supposed to go like a bad drug trip. the aomori arc really spoke to me & i loved shura so much more after that, contrary to the contents of this fic. lol. thank you for reading!


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